Survey reveals enterprises gamble on customer satisfaction

VoltDB has announced the results of a new survey examining the attitudes, perceptions and realities of transactional data consistency for enterprise leaders and developers. The survey, conducted by independent panel research firm Research Now, uncovers the state of transactional consistency in the enterprise and which customer experience compromises organizations are willing to make for faster product and solution deployments.

The survey found that nearly 70 percent of IT decision makers and developers agree that reliable database transactions and database consistency are most important to customer-facing operations, with 60 percent saying it would improve customer satisfaction. In fact, nearly 40 percent of respondents are more afraid of learning about an app's inconsistency issues and/or data reliability issues from an angry customer than they are of finding out from their boss or others within their organizations. Despite the importance of customer-facing operations, only 58 percent of organizations consider having reliable transactions critically important to their business.

Key Takeaways

- Only half of organizations (53 percent) believe the most important part of their operational business applications is that they use immediately consistent and accurate data.

- Still, businesses acknowledge that applying inconsistent data to business analytics risks serious customer service and satisfaction issues (62 percent), negative impact on the brand (53 percent) and financial loss (47 percent).

- Respondents report that unreliable customer transaction data would both impact future customer interactions (51 percent) and could negatively impact customer retention altogether (36 percent).

- Nearly 75 percent of respondents say data consistency is the top priority over speed/time to market (21 percent) for their organization – despite 45 percent saying they would move forward with a design approach that could not guarantee consistent results to accelerate time to market.

- Although 43 percent of respondents say their operations are dependent on reliable transactions and consistent data all of the time, only seven percent of operations are actually conducted with consistent and accurate data all of the time.

- While 95 percent of respondents say they are taking action to ensure data consistency and accuracy, 64 percent say they rely on the application developer to do so – leaving room for human error.